On September 7th, 2020, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced that Thailand had joined the OECD system for Mutual Acceptance of Data (MAD) in the assessment of chemicals, which would benefit a lot for the enterprises who trades chemical products between Thailand and other MAD participating countries.
The MAD system is a multilateral agreements, which allows the participating countries to share the results of various non-clinical safety tests done on chemicals and chemical products, such as industrial chemicals and pesticides. It shall be noted that the participating countries must carry out related testing using OECD standards for test methods and data quality.
Currently, all 37 OECD member countries and 7 full adherents, namely Argentina, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and Thailand, are MAD participating countries. Since Thailand has joined the MAD system, the non-clinical safety data produced by Thailand for chemical products and related to the protection of human health and the environment will be accepted by all 44 countries adhering to MAD.
Before a country participates in the MAD system, evaluation shall be carried by OECD on the country’s laboratories. Thailand has taken the evaluation two times, in 2012 and 2018. In May this year, Thailand was recommended for approval to join MAD, and now it is been finalized. After joining the MAD system, there are two main benefits to Thailand. The first one is that it removes the need for duplicating tests for Thailand’s' products marketed in multiple MAD participating countries and secondly, it qualifies Thai laboratories to carry out some tests required by international chemical regulations.
